Apple is busy dressing Moscone West in San Francisco for its Worldwide Developer Conference, and one of the first event banners to be erected has already hinted that we can expect the company to announce iOS 8 next week.

Twitter is exploding with tweets and images about the several banners currently going up at the convention center long-used for WWDC. A large blue banner with a water-like background and a svelte number eight in the foreground is by far generating the most excitement and chatter online. That's likely because the banner represents iOS 8 - the next version of Apple's operating system for mobile devices.

Apple's annual developer's conference is set to run from 2 June to 6 June. The company first announced the conference in April, sending invites to the media. Apple typically uses WWDC as a stage for revealing new operating systems. Rumours have suggested, for instance, that Apple will unveil both iOS 8 and an update to OS X Mavericks at this year's event. We also hope to see some hardware upgrades and refreshes.

Based on the new banner at Moscone West, one could speculate that iOS 8 will bring a more subtle color scheme compared to iOS 7 and maybe even some elements pulled from OS X Mavericks. Apple showed off both iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks at last year's conference: the banner for iOS 7 featured a flatter and more colorful design than any previous version of iOS, while the OS X Mavericks banner featured a wave-like design similar the design seen in the new banner.

This is all speculation though. Check out the gallery below for more tweeted pictures of the new banner, and make sure you come back to Pocket-lint on Monday. We'll be live in San Francisco, covering all the latest news from WWDC 2014.

Update: And now the OS X banner is going up at Moscone West, according to several tweets.The banner has an image of what looks like California's Yosemite National Park in the background with an X in the foreground.

When Apple unveiled OS X Mavericks at last year's WWDC, it departed from the use of big cats in naming schemes and moved to names based on places in California. So, could the next Mac OS from Apple be called OS X Yosemite? Only time will tell.